If these walls could talk: Bay Village's Cashelmara linked to Gilded Age tragedy

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Washington Lawrence built the stone house on the lake that today is known as Cashelmara.

But he never would have called it anything so elaborate, or even given it a name at all.

The residents of Dover Township -- today's Bay Village -- wouldn't have either. Though a mansion by anyone's standard, the Lawrence family and their friends simply called the 10-bedroom turreted edifice a house.

But if you scratch the surface, this Victorian-era home on Lake Road unfolds a Horatio Alger tale of an orphan-turned-millionaire, at least one Gilded Age wedding, a tragic accident and a scandal that involved a murder.

And it all happened before 1901.

Some five decades later, converted to Bay ViewHospital, the building and its grounds figured prominently in one of the most famous murder cases in the country, the one involving Dr. Sam Sheppard.

If any home had a reason to spawn haunted spirits, it would be this one.

Bay Village Historical SocietyWashington Lawrence.

An orphaned boyreaches for the top

Washington Herbert Lawrence's impressive name fit his pedigree, which historians trace back to Robert Lawrence of Lancashire, England, who was knighted by King Richard I for bravery in battle.

Washington's father, Joel B. Lawrence, was descended from John Lawrence, a member of the Massachusetts Bay Colonywho had emigrated from Englandin 1635. Two hundred years later, Joel Lawrence made his way to Olmsted Township.

He and his wife, Catherine, underwent the privations that many pioneers did, but Lawrence eventually invested in a tract of land on which he built a flour mill.

But he died young in 1851 and, two years later, his wife died as well, leaving Washington Lawrence an orphan at 13.

Soon after that, Lawrence was working as a clerk in Berea whilestilla student in the Olmsted schools. At 16, he began studying at Baldwin University, the precursor to Baldwin-Wallace College. There, he became friends with Milton Baldwin, the son of the college's founder. When Baldwin died, his will appointed Lawrence to run all his property, which included a mill.

Lawrence went on to work in several businesses inMissouri and Kansas before returning to Olmsted Township in 1861 to work in various manufacturing businesses in Cleveland. Soon, he amassed enough money to buy stock in a company that would later merge into the Brush Electric Co.

According to an 1897 book by Cleveland historian James Harrison Kennedy, "Mr. Lawrence had unbounded faith in the future of electricity" and furnished a large portion of the original investment in Brush Electric, famous for producing the arc light that was invented by Charles Brush. By the early 1880s, Lawrence was general manager of this, the largest electrical manufacturing company in the world.

But Lawrence was a man who was always reaching, and he was fascinated by the company's carbon department. By 1894, he had erected the largest carbon factory in the world, in the southeast corner of what is now Lakewood. He named it the National Carbon Co. (it later merged with Union Carbide Corp.). You can see still see the buildings in the complex today, at West 117th Street and Madison Avenue.

One of his partners in that venture was future Ohio Gov. Myron Herrick, who would go on to become the U.S. ambassador to France in the years leading up to Word War I.

"Cleveland at the turn of the 20th century had a vital and innovative culture of entrepreneurship," says Dean Zimmerman, director of the Western Reserve Historical Society. "The emerging fields at the time here were automobiles and electricity, as well as older, established moneymakers, like railroads, chemicals and the granddaddy of them all, oil."

And, as Zimmerman explains, "New wealth in the Gilded Age expressed itself through residences."

While many millionaires at the time were building mansions to the east of downtown, and at Franklin Circle on the West Side, Lawrence was drawn to the lakeshore still farther west. He had to head 10 miles from Public Square before he could find a tract of land large enough to suit him. There, he bought 125 acres, which he turned into Dover Bay Park.

This private club would be the first place in Northeast Ohio at which the game of golf would be played -- and only the second official golf course created here, after the one in Bratenahl. A summer colony sprang up around the Dover Township park, with roomy cottages populated by Lawrence and his wealthy friends.

Lawrence had married Harriet Collister in 1863, and by the late 1890s, the couple and their seven daughters were living in a large wood-frame "summer" house at the colony.But the patriarch wanted to build a large home close to the Lake Erie shore, one that would be comfortable year-round.

He also wanted it built of stone, because he was fearful of fire, which wasn't illogical: Fires were common, and, after all, a good part of Chicago had burned down in 1871.

And what a house Lawrence would build, with the help of locally famed architects Forrest Coburnand Frank Barnum. Barnum would become well-known for such projects as the Park Building at Public Square, the Caxton Building and many Cleveland schools.

The design of the home would be Romanesque, popular at the time, which incorporated elements of the classical with Gothic revival. The mansion contained three sitting rooms, a library, a dining room and kitchen, and a massive hall and staircase that led to eight bedrooms on the second floor.

The third floor featured a ballroom, two bedrooms, an enormous linen closet and servant's quarters, with a section reserved as a sewing room for the seamstresses who would come each year to make the family wardrobe.

The house was braced by two octagonal rooms or turrets. On the first floor, this created a porch and sunroom space; on the second, a sitting room.

The three-story house would also feature another notable luxury -- an elevator, situated in the front center hallway. ("That was very early for a residential elevator," says Zimmerman, especially in a single-family home.)

According to some accounts, the family had begun gradually moving into the house in the spring of 1900. The Lawrences would have spent the summer on the grounds anyway.

That June, one of the seven daughters, Ella, was married at the mansion. According to a Plain Dealer story, "No more beautiful setting could have been selected" than the Lawrences' new home.

Ella was marrying Will Orin Mathews, and the home was "thrown open to guests, as soft summer air swept through the wide halls." Decorations included palms and American Beauty roses; the mantel was set off by ferns; and large clusters of pink peonies dressed the pink drawing room.

But for the bride's father, things began to go awry soon after the wedding.

First, while playing tennis at his club in July, Washington broke his arm. It seems to have been badly set, and within a few months, complications caused doctors to amputate it.

Then, while inspecting the home later that summer -- perhaps a little off-balance from the amputation -- Lawrence fell down the elevator shaft. He was injured, though not fatally.

That September, shame came to the Lawrence family when newspapers wrote that daughter Cora Lawrence's husband, F. Wayland Brown, had been charged in connection with a murder in Chicago.

Cora, her father told reporters, was ill and living with her family while her husband lived in Chicago. Brown, "formerly a well-known young man of this city," worked for a Chicago detective agency and befriended two men -- one also a detective, the other a doctor named August Unger -- as well as Marie Antoinette Defenbach, 23. She was said to be Dr. Unger's paramour.

According to newspapers in October 1900 -- even The New York Times covered this story -- the four had conspired to commit insurance fraud. Defenbach was to take out a policy on herself and then pretend to die (with Dr. Unger in attendance). Before cremation, her body would be switched with that of a dead vagrant.

Instead, someone gave the young lady poison -- the prescription bottle came from a Dover Township pharmacy -- and she died in her boardinghouse on LaSalle Street inChicago. The lawyers with whom she taken out the insurance a few weeks earlier came forth, and the three male conspirators were arrested.

Brown was later convicted for his role in the killing but avoided prison by paying a $2,000 fine.

By this point, Washington Lawrence was said to be suffering from an illness, perhaps cancer, and the stress and shame of the arrest couldn't have helped.

That November, he died. He was 60.

His widow, daughters and some of their husbands officially made the mansion their home, which Lawrence never got the chance to enjoy.

A Rocky River manremembers the old days

Jack Fuller, 87, lives in Rocky River. Lawrence died before he was born, but Fuller was a friend of one of the Lawrence grandsons, Tom Ingersoll, with whom he played at the house. (He was distantly related to the family.)

"I was probably 4 or 5," he says. "It was like a mausoleum to me, dark and heavy, Victorian and conservative. But the staff was good to us."

Naturally, the boys slid down the massive banister, "until the butler caught us." Fuller remembers that on Saturdays, the Lawrences' chauffeur would take rock salt kept in the cellar and hand-crank an ice-cream maker to make the dessert, "which had to be ready for Sunday dinner."

He doesn't recall ever hearing the story of a murder involving a Lawrence son-in-law, "but I remember hearing there was a problem in Chicago."

And, more happily, he remembers the horses in the barn, the cow or two that provided milk, and swimmers on the beach, including Winifred Lawrence, the only Lawrence daughter who dared to wear a bathing costume.

Members of the family continued to live in the mansion until the 1940s, when they sold it to the Sheppard family, who turned it into the Bay View Osteopathic Hospital.

The Sheppard sons were popular in the community, and Sam was considered the handsomest of the three, says Kay Laughlin, a Bay Village historian and author.

"He was very good-looking and well thought of in the village," she says. "He was the doctor for our football team."

But over the Fourth of July weekend in 1954, his wife, Marilyn, was slain while he, he said, was sleeping on a daybed in their house, which was several miles west of the hospital.

Fred Drenkhan, who at 15 used to deliver The Plain Dealer to the Lawrence mansion, was by then a Bay Village police officer. It was he who led the other officers to Sam's parents' house, on the hospital grounds a few weeks after the murder.Their home had previously belonged to a Lawrence daughter, Irene Fuller.

"Sam was having dinner at his parents' house with a group of people, and I went in and I said, 'Sam, could I talk to you outside a minute?' " Drenkhan recalls. "We went out on the porch. He said he appreciated that I didn't walk in the room and slap handcuffs on him.

"He said, 'Well, I guess I knew it was coming.' "

Sheppard was convicted in the first trial (it was revealed at the trial that he had had a three-year affair with Susan Hayes, a nurse at Bay View) and acquitted in a second trial more than a decade later.

Ghosts of the pastin Cashelmara today

In the 1980s, architect and developer Bob Corna devised a plan to create condominiums out of the closed hospital. He built a number of condos around it, too.

It was he who named the development Cashelmara, which means "stone house by the sea" in Gaelic.

Today, there are still vestiges of the Lawrence mansion's glory days -- the spacious porch, the gleaming mahogany of the mantel and sideboard in the dining room, the magnificent staircase, and the wood-lined elevator that was Lawrence's pride.

There's a vestige of the hospital, too: Its morgue was turned into storage lockers for residents -- those who dare to use them, anyway.

A long hallway features copies of black-and-white photographs of Lawrence, his wife and the horse-and-carriage life they lived.

Gerti Soderquist and her husband, Robert, have lived for nearly 20 years in a two-story unit in the mansion's back section, with glorious views of Lake Erie.

She walked by the picture-lined hallway once and saw a man point to a photo of Lawrence and exclaim, "That's the guy I saw in my bedroom at 1:30 in the morning!" Other residents say they've encountered a woman in a robe, perhaps a long-ago hospital patient.

Gerti herself hasn't seen any ghosts, but she wouldn't mind if she did.

"I first came here when my father had gall-bladder surgery in the 1970s, and I thought, 'What a beautiful building,' " she says. "I never thought then they'd make it a place you could live in, but I'm so glad they did."

Washington Lawrence isn't a name that many people know today; his fame was eclipsed by contemporaries with such names as Rockefeller and Mather.

His family also didn't leave their hometown of Bay Village a monetary legacy.

"But the mansion is still here," says historian Laughlin. "It's something we can look at. It's such a gorgeous place, and it was too bad he never really got to enjoy it."